stars in my eyes

honey tea  in my hands

a button up shirt

and ***** grey pants

standing on a hill
the moon watched me closely
and sung into my ear
i sung loudly after him

you honestly think i miss you?

i miss  the days
i talked with the moon
and sat on a porch
with my friends
as they smoked cigarettes
the sunset...resting in our eyes
as we laughed
and made quotes,
the days i biked  
and felt so freely

then i proceeded to melt

into the earths  fingers...

I feel the caress of my own fingers
on my own neck as I place my collar
and think pityingly
of the kind women I have known.

I felt no innocence
peering through her window that night
but I couldn't help it
she looked so beautiful
half naked in front of the mirror
with only a candle lighting the room

I had to stay quiet
waiting for her to fall asleep that night
but I didn't mind it
so use to my heartbeat racing
half naked lying across her bed
with only a candle lighting the room

after, when you are driving
75 miles one way just to get to her
and her wind-touched hair,
bleached white by the September
sun, the gray sky coughing up clouds,
that is when the doubts surface,
hard as stones.

it is late afternoon by the time you arrive,
the storm has already been through here.
you are not in your own element.
you are a runaway.

but, then she is there, standing right in front
of you, wet with rain, slender as a branch.
you watch as she makes her way over
and your heart gardens, rupturing red.

At one end of the couch
you sit, mute as a pillow
tossed onto the upholstery.

I watch you sometimes
when you don't know I'm watching
and I see you. Who you are.

You are a self made man.
Hard suffering. You are grey
stone and damp earth.
A long scar on a pale sky.

The television is tuned to CNN.
The world's tragedies flicker
across your face like some
foreign film.

You are expressionless.
Your usual gestures ground to salt.

How do you explain yourself
to people that do not know you?
How do you explain to them,
this is me; that is not me.

However many words you choose
in whatever context with
whichever adjectives you use
could not compare.

Even you describing you
would not be you.
Not totally.

Your hands are folded
together, resting in your lap.
I study those hands until
every groove becomes familiar.

Like a favorite hat,
you wear your silence
comfortably.

I sometimes can not help
but wonder what we will
talk about if we ever
run out of things to say.

You are the curve
I burrow into. The strength
I borrow. You are the red sun
rising over the mountain.
You are the mountain.

Pale scrapings of people
with lipstick ringed glasses
and cigarettes burning,
and laughter trickling up and down
their knotty throats.
What is this,
a gathering of henhouse critics?

My father's voice in the back of my head,
saying, forget that I'm dead and if you
can not do that than pretend.

I am standing
just outside the gallery
beneath the shadowy bough of a birch.
The moon is floating in the sky's dark lap.
Faraway I can hear the ocean sigh.

Now father, I am asking,
what smile are you wearing?
What color are your eyes again?
How many teeth have you lost?

Don't you think I want a kiss.
Perhaps I don't. Perhaps I don't
want to stand and pretend you
not dead while the wet, champagne
mouths of the living tell me how wonderful
your paintings are.

As they crook their fingers and strain their necks,
lose their vocabulary inside the artwork's depths
and colors.

Father, I want your reputation to outlive the pursuits
of others with their iron-on reviews after an hour's
worth of browsing at a lifetime of your work.

Father, are you crying?
Stop that sound.

I went looking for God
but I found you instead.
Bad luck or destiny,
you decide.

Buried in the muck,
the soot of the city,
sorrow for an appetite,
devil on your left shoulder,
angel on your right.

You, with your thorny rhythms
and tragic, midnight melodies.

My heart never tried
to commit suicide before.

What is scorn but a broken back that has to lift the world?
An arrow bent, scraping through the air never to hits it's target?
I am one, but a crying soul to lift above my shoulders what my back could not.
                    What is love to bring us peace?
           Is it the toil tossed beneath our feet, trampled and torn?
Or does it live here within us, ready to swell and overflow to the empty spaces that lay void?
Bring me silence in the screeching night.
In the stillness I hear the earth wake and breathe.
I can feel the mountains shake as they stretch their rocks causing crashing avalanches of unwanted worry to the ground.
Let us break our ribs open to allow more room for love to rest inside.
Pack it in tightly, not letting any to spill out onto the floor and if it does spill,
let it overflow from our mouths and lips to each person we see.
Speaking truth and peace to each one for they are just like us.
                      
                        Lost in a unpredictable world.

Afraid of the drifting current that pushes us from one place to the next.
                        Consistency isn't consistent with me
and I want no part of conformity to live within me.
                        
                         I am a prayer.
                        
                         I am a song.
                
                         A dance and a battle cry.

I am a thousand trees never thirsty, for growth comes naturally and loneliness is just a disease and finally we found the cure:

To love yourself fully and completely and never look behind you.

For it is behind that haunts but the future welcomes.

So step boldly into the traveling circus of life that never stops running, and the freak show is the main attraction because freaks like you and me,

We're going to change the world.